Mix and Match Magic

I’m following Brian’s lead here, in that this is a collection of ideas that you can build on or use outright, if you feel so inclined, not so much a proper design document. Since I currently lack programming skills and the independent wealth to hire someone with said skills, well, I probably won’t be making a game with this anytime soon. So, have at it, and if you can make it better, well, so much the better, aye?

The core notion here is to make magic in a game creative and explorative, trying to evoke the flavor of a magical researcher with a degree in MacGyvering their way through game world problems. Most games that use magic are very, very constrained, effectively giving magical equivalents of tech trees rather than letting magic be wild and variable. Players always know what their magical school can do, since the spells are always the same. Individual magic spells tend to have one use and one use only, with far too many of them slotting into Damage Per Second (or per fight) min/maxing.

I’m looking to push the boundaries a bit. I want players to be able to weave magic into new shapes, not unlike how Dumbledore crafted wholly new magical spells here and there, or how Voldemort was able to do things wildly beyond that universe’s “standard” spell set taught to the students. In my mind, magic is wildly creative (even when dangerously destructive), a practice of curious individuals who seek ways to warp reality and go beyond what merely is into the realm of what may be. Pushing and pulling at threads of magic in the tapestry of a magical reality can and should produce new and interesting effects. I’d like to invite players (more Psychochild and Rampant Coyote!) to indulge in a bit of creativity within the game world’s magic system. I’d like to let them play and have fun.

I’ll admit to being significantly influenced by the description of magic in books like Sabriel (a great book on necromantic magic and how it might work for good) and the Dragon Knight series (whose lead character, a timelost modern scholar in a medieval Englandish land, is stuck with learning magic and devising unique solutions to problems). Those iterations of Magic are creative, hardly a list of spells that a stereotypical Magememorizes and then casts while adventuring.

I’m also influenced by the SquareSoft classic Secret of Evermore, which had a magic system built on “alchemy”, with reagents to mix for various effects. It was somewhere in between, with alchemical spell recipes and little room for experimentation, but a conceptual foundation of using real materials for magical effects, and elemental combinations that produced different effects. (This also forced players to choose between spells that shared ingredients, a curious tactical layer.)

It’s fair to note that many game players don’t necessarily want to be creative, they just want tools to blow up the bad guys, and an overly complex research and exploration system just bogs that sort of player down. Still, the mindset of a creative scientist/mage isn’t something that players often get to play with, and, well… it interests me. Perhaps there’s something viable in here, perhaps not, but since a large part of what I do here is explore, I may as well do so. I love to create game systems that let players explore and dig into possibilities. Less Team Ninja, more Sid Meier, as it were.

So, a few core thoughts I’m building on, though certainly not the only way to run this:

Magic is comprised of different ingredients, not unlike how matter is comprised of elements found in the periodic table. As such, magical ingredients mixed in different proportions and in different ways will produce a wide variety of effects.

Magic can be used for combat, utility, creation and destruction. Whether a high or low magic world, magic is pervasive, and used in everyday life. A blacksmith uses magic as readily as an archmage, albeit in different ways and to different ends. The spectrum of creativity, power and efficacy is probably wide, but magic itself is neither unusual nor inscrutable. It is almost a science, approachable by anyone with the will and intellect to master it. That said, mystics and religionists do cloak it in pomp and secrecy…

Magic uses both reagents and mental components (willpower, incantations, emotion, whatever), sometimes together. Totemic magic tends to be a mix of the two, for example. Pure material magic is mostly scientific, just with an expanded periodic table compared to what we’re used to. (Not unlike how dilithium in Star Trek’s magic, er, science fiction system is a variant of quartz with a subspace component… at least, according to some books that try to explain Trek.)

Magic underlies everything in reality, and as such, nearly everything can be manipulated by a sufficiently talented mage. Interconnections abound, and effects may be far-reaching, spatially or chronologically. The “fabric of reality” is literally envisioned by some, and manipulated as one might manipulate cloth, whether in gross maneuvers of grand sweeping curtains or subtle tweaks of single strings that touch others.

Magic is a form of energy, and is subject to magical laws of thermodynamics.

Magic can be seen, tasted, felt, heard and even smelled. A magical “sense” also exists, functioning as a gauge and locator.

Say, in one combat, if the orchestra is harmonious and the woodwinds are strongest, a healing wind helps you and your neighbors in an Area of Effect heal spell… but as the woodwinds tire out, you let their volume drop and make the brass section suddenly dissonant. Nearby foes are consequently blasted with summoned shrapnel. Most fall to the assault, but a few runners threaten to call down reinforcements. You quickly get the percussion ramped up to give yourself a speed boost, and shift the dissonance to the strings section for some shrill ranged attacks to take down the runners. Alternating between minor and major keys shifts your defense/offense balance, not unlike balancing speed, weapons and shields in an X-Wing from a central power pool.

Maybe altering the composition of your orchestra sections shifts elemental properties (more cellos, fewer violins means a slight Water edge to string attacks). Altering the balance of your orchestra (more woodwinds, less percussion) effectively shifts your combat focus. Enemy status attacks can alter this on the fly by targeting sections of your orchestra; you can be hamstrung by losing a few percussionists to a targeted sleep spell, for example.

To be sure, much of this particular design is just the Same Old stuff in a new cloak, what with elemental properties, ranged vs. melee combat and so on, just wielding a conductor’s baton, but it could prove interesting and even educational. It doesn’t all need to be about combat either, since environmental puzzles can be built around using music the right way. It’s almost like Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, where the titular Ocarina had magical effects… but in this case, you’re riffing on the magic musical spells as you go, weaving in new effects by changing the music. These changes can be subtle or gross, and need not even affect other effects. The strings can keep up a ranged barrage even as you use the brass and woodwinds to do different things.

Further, you can use music in different ways to deal with environmental or social puzzles. A soothing melody might make diplomacy easier (or a looming dissonant theme might make an ally more threatening to bluff through a situation), and a turbulent woodwind blast might clear a path through the brush.

Mr. Rosewater has made mention before of the various “knobs” that they have to tune their card designs. Mana cost and color are perhaps the biggest ones, but there are a whole host of mechanics and effects that get used on cards. Even the notion of card speed is a key knob to turn when considering combat resolution and priority on effect resolution. If those knobs were put in the hands of the player in a magical 4X game, where magic spells can be crafted and tuned based on a logical underpinning of constraints and components, you might see something a bit more creative than MOM, though with similar ends.

For example, a 2 mana spell using 1 Life mana, 1 Ether mana might create a Fate Runner if it’s a creature spell, but if it becomes a construction spell, it might be something like a Divine Presence enchantment, making local churches more effective. Same ingredients, different ends, all in the application.

That’s more of a prebaked recipe than creativity, though. Imagine then, if Life mana always served to make construction quicker, healing stronger, and creatures better defended. Tossing a spare Life mana into a particular spell you’re casting might not unlock a wholly new preconceived recipe, but it will have an effect on whatever it is you’re doing. It might enhance your efforts, or subtly shift them. Say, a Life mana rider on a Water/Fire creature summon; the creature doesn’t change its core form, but will be different from other creatures of the same species, say with a bolstered Faith attribute or better inherent leadership. A summoned creature with a Death mana rider might be more menacing, since it inherits a mild Fear aura.

Maybe location matters, too, and spells cast near a mana node are inherently more powerful, or perhaps they are more unstable (or both) due to some resonating interference in the magical leylines or some such. Perhaps sympathetic mana is enhanced by local leylines, and conflicting mana is diminished.

Further, if you can use that magic in various ways, say by molding the landscape and even interpersonal charm spells and such for the diplomacy segment, you step a little bit out of the “magic is for combat” mindset. If there are alternate win conditions, even constructive ones, magic might be used to bolster the methods to reach those ends. Imagine a mage who spent his time and research on new ways to build efficiently, and keep his people happy, earning a civil victory or some such, all the while befuddling or charming the socks off his neighbors (something MoM allowed, but the tools for that path were pretty limited). Magic could be bent to serve many different ends if it were sufficiently flexible.

Of course, devs might have to provide a set of “baseline” spells for players to use if they aren’t inclined to be creative. They would function like the various Mech chassis designs in BattleTech, letting players jump into the action… but rewarding those intrepid game explorers who min/max the living daylights out of complex systems. It does seem that 4X games tend to attract some of that sort of player, and complexity is more of a feature, less of a roadblock.

Interestingly, magic that is built from ingredients rather than recipes need not always behave predictably. Cooking in the real world sometimes produces unintended effects as ingredients intermingle in weird ways. Timing can also be an issue. Throw that Fire magic in early and the artifact sword infilcts a damage over time “slow burn”, but throw it in late in the forging and the sword carries a flame aura that chars (debuff) or flat out disintegrates targets.

It’s also worth noting that at some point, sure, you’re dealing with database management and the finite world of game development. Also, sufficiently dedicated players will datamine everything and post it in a FAQ. That said, in the meantime, players who want to experiment on their own will have tools to do so, and I want to encourage and reward that sort of experimentation.

At any rate, that’s just a pair off the top of my head, more brainstorming than polishing off a real proposal. There are certainly other directions to run with this.

One key might be to balance complexity with playability. It’s also important to avoid feature creep, with too much going on to be fun. Still, BattleTech, MoM, MtG and other games show that complexity isn’t antithetical to good design. Certainly, it has to make sense and serve the goals of the game, and the game should be playable without being a rocket scientist, but it really is nice to reward those players who want to dig a bit more into game systems.

Where would you take this and run with it? Is it possible to let players be chefs, playing in a magical kitchen to make crazy Rube Goldberg fun? Is it worth trying to develop that flexibilty when the mass market just wants WoW and God of War clones? I’m very curious to see what Elemental winds up doing, as a spiritual successor to MoM.

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Maybe you could add an element of predictable change. Think magical winds and currents which will change the nature of spells. If you know the currents and what they do, it is predictable, but if you aren’t testing the currents, you’re going to have some exciting results. A skilled mage would then be in the habit of testing the local magic to see what works best. Maybe frost spells would be too hard to control, but a fire spell would have enough impact to effectively imitate the snaring effects of frost.

I love this idea. It’s something I’ve thought would be really neat, but you articulated it a lot better than I would have been able to.

One system I thought would work well is a system where you draw symbols to create magic. The symbols would have different meanings, and you could use different colors to use different elements. You could combine symbols of different elements to get different effects. So you could draw a circle to get an area of effect, make it red to make a fireball type spell. Draw a triangle to affect a single target, then make it green for healing. So draw a green triangle surrounded by a red circle, and get a fireball that heals the target, and hurts everyone around the target. You could watch other mages cast spells to try to learn new spells, or new combinations.

Klep, I love the idea of making the environment matter, especially if it’s variable with elements of predictability. That opens up a LOT of handles to make exploration interesting… something I’m always a fan of. Thanks for dropping by!

Longasc… I really don’t know, but if that’s true, kudos points to Mr. Wardell. They really seem to want Elemental to work, and I’m hoping they pull it off. MOO/MOM run deep in my gaming blood.

Darius, I’ve seen a few games over the years that have explored rune drawing systems, and I’ve always wanted to try them out… they just tend to slip down the priority list when a sweet RPG or tactical game shows up. There’s definitely potential there, especially combining runes like that. One question, though: How would you handle color? The games I’ve seen with rune drawing tend to require fast drawing, and the controls for changing color (especially with a DS stylus instead of a mouse with two buttons) and quick response might really need a slower pace. That’s not a bad thing, just a consideration.

That’s true, I wonder if there’s a technical reason for requiring fast rune drawing? You could handle the colors with the d-pad or face buttons, that would give you four, then you could use a should button like a shift-key to get four more.

Speaking of magic affecting other senses, I posted a concept for a barbarian-themed magic system that used the five senses to categorize magic: http://www.psychochild.org/?p=200 For example, the sense of smell was used for detecting magic, so magic had a definite smell to it for detecting it. The image of a shaman sniffing an area to detect magic fit within a Robert E. Howard type world.

Another idea I’ve been considering lately is to have magic made up of verbs + theme. So, a player would choose a verb (like “heal” or “destroy”) then apply a theme to it to get the specific spell. Let’s say we take the four classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) as our theme: heal + water = restore hit points, heal + fire = purge poison/disease, destroy + fire = fireball, etc. Not quite free form, but makes magic a bit more interesting than just buying “fireball 3” from a class trainer.

In the end, I think there needs to be a careful balance. As you said, some people don’t care to be creative. They just want to fling firey death or soothe their friends’ wounds. But, adding a bit more mystique to magic can’t hurt. 🙂

There’s a game which has concepts like this. It’s called Avalon Code, for the Nintendo DS, and it has one of the most creative magic systems I have ever seen.

You are a boy or girl, given a magical book and allied to four powerful spirits. The book has the capability to “scan” almost everything in the game: enemy creatures, items, and friendly NPCs. Once scanned, you see into their very essence and can take out their attributes in the form of puzzle pieces.

What’s more, and what’s incredible, is that you can rearrange and reinsert those attributes into those same creatures. Want to make goblins weaker? Take out their Iron aspect and replace it with Weakness. That poor bedridden girl? Scan her, and deep inside you can see the tiny Sickness piece inside. Somehow you can remove it, you just need the right attributes from other creatures.

And with each person you scan, you save a record, because you have been chosen to record the world before it gets destroyed…

Game itself is a little rough, but that system is so deep its ridiculous. The book itself has hundreds of pages and is a real book interface on the lower half of your screen. It’s almost too deep a system, but I think you might want to try that game and see how it works with your vision , Tesh.

Hmm, the closest I ever got to something like this was on a couple of MUDs.

It was just a skin, really. The spells were the usual ‘magic missile’, ‘fireball’ stuff.

But players could customise the descriptions.

I forget exactly what spell I was casting (I think it was ‘slow’), but one of the spells I wrote made tar rain from the heavens, and cover my target in gloop. After which, they were showered with little yellow feathers. >.>

Players could also *teach* their customised spells to other players.

That tar and feather spell became oddly successful. >.> <.<

While that in no way addresses the cookiecutterness of the *effects* of magic in most games, it sure added a lot of atmosphere.

The magic (and anti-magic) systems I have in the game I’m working on try to push boundaries like this too:

It’s mainly a gesture system, with each magician having his / her own gestures that correspond to their mental will. What this means is that whatever the magician pictures in their mind can be “bound” to a particular gesture. Since the gesture is unique to that person, mage hunters and other onlookers can have a tough time picking them out.

The gesture itself can be modified as the magician grows in experience and power. Want the fireball bigger? Make your gesture a bit bigger. Want it hotter? Modify the core of the gesture. Want it to travel faster? Lengthen the gesture. This makes spells pretty customizable, but the magician is still responsible.

There’s a cast time limit wherein the magic is actually filtered through the devices the magicians wear (long story, but they only have permission to use magic from the sentient planet’s core and it must be filtered through a device called a Crux or else the raw power will just consume them) so in the beginning their gestures are large and obtuse, but as they learn to wield it, they can shrink gestures and get more power, or even combine gestures for double potency.

As far as types of magic, they are chosen by the magically adept before they go to an academy to study, but during training it may be revealed that a practitioner may be more suited to focus on a different element than they’ve chosen. They can also, once finished training in their main element, choose a sub element, but they must make a pilgrimage to the chosen temple of that element.

What all this allows is free use of magic in however the players can imagine it, but it still has constraint. Channeling needs focus, you can’t have a cast time longer than 6 seconds and your magic power grows with the level of Crux you have. However, what you see in your mind with your element is what you get. You can create a sword made of fire to pair with a regular sword you have to dual wield. You can create a quick earth shield if something is flying at you or you can lob a huge boulder at a castle if there are no catapults around.

The mage hunter side of it, or anti-magic, relies on the absorption of magic to get started, wherein the mage hunter has a glove or other piece of armor that has special gems in it. Each gem represents a different element and will glow brighter the more it’s absorbed. The brighter the glow, the more powerful the challenge action will be, but it can only be a spell of that element. Since our world has few resistances, (I.E. fire mages aren’t necessarily resistant to fire), if a fire mage sends a fireball at a mage hunter, it can be redirected, absorbed, flung back at the magician, or changed into something else completely. The mage hunter can save the stored power for a short time as well, perhaps to aid companions (by quickening their movements with air essence or mending wounds with life essence).

That’s a brief description, but I wanted the magic users to really feel like they had freedom in their casting and not having to rely on a list of spells they could buy and which would be the best to get, etc.

I believe your thinking in the wrong direction of ‘enablement’. Game mechanics/rules can only restrict. You need to think actually the other way, in how your restricting the player with your ideas. In what way you want to restrict them.

Because why stop them at all – let them say any old thing and it beats the problem.

“But that would be boring, they might just belch and say that’s enough for the dragon to go away!”

Exactly! So how are you going to restrict his ability to get past the problem. You’ve already identified that belching doesn’t work – there’s a rule. Or maybe you like the idea of belching sometimes working as a magic – okay, a percentage change? A certain amount of points spent?

Think in terms of restriction – your probably thinking of mundane game world first, then magic which unrestricts the mage from the normal rules and so your thinking in terms of enablement. But as a rules designer, your palette is only ever one of restriction.

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